liroa15 's review for:

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Ben Miller, Huw Lemmey

3.0

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While fun in a weird way, I think this book failed to reclaim anything. I failed to see what the early chapters had to do with the narrative because by the narrative’s own admission, there was no “gay” identity, and if there had been, most of the profiles would not have used it. Hadrian, so-called good emperor, was a bad gay because from what I can tell, he acted the way Roman men acted, and society today dislikes it. Saul was a bad gay either for being a prostitute or for testifying in court? Honestly, I’m not sure. While there are a raft of colonizing bad gays—from Casement to Mead—and today we view their actions as bad, this is today’s judgement on actions for which we hardly have the whole picture. And while Johnson and Hoover and Cohn and Fortyn all look like very bad gays from mu point of view, I’m sure there’s someone out there looking through a different lens. I guess what I want yo say is that this book is full of people who made choices you may disagree with and who were gay. It’s important to keep in mind that some of them had no concept of gay and a sexual identity is a recent construct—the authors and take pains to point you’d out—and there’s just a lot of shitty people out there. Some of them are gay and some aren’t. Trying not be a shitty human hopefully keeps us out of a redo of this book 100 years from now